Minggu, 20 Oktober 2013

Watching TV Makes You Smarter BUT Even Bad TV Is Better

Skeptics might argue that I have stacked the deck here
by focusing on relatively highbrow titles like ''The Sopranos'' or ''The West
Wing,'' when in fact the most significant change in the last five years of
narrative entertainment involves reality TV. Does the contemporary pop cultural
landscape look quite as promising if the representative show is ''Joe
Millionaire'' instead of ''The West Wing''?

I think it does, but to answer that question properly,
you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk
about the golden age of television in the early 70's, they forget to mention
how awful most television programming was during much of that decade. If early
television took its cues from the stage, today's reality programming is reliably
structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more
challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming
culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as
you play.

When we watch these shows, the part
of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us
scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain
characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat.
Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the
characters, but those connections don't have the same participatory effect,
because traditional narratives aren't explicitly about strategy. We absorb
stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that
second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social
dexterity rather than the physical kind.